[WP7 App] Irish Train Times

Odaise Gaelach

For all you Windows Phone 7 owners,

I've developed an app for WP7 called Irish Train Times. It shows real-time arrivals and departures information for over a hundred train stations in Ireland. It auto-refreshes every five minutes and uses Iarnród Éireann's own feeds. It's quick, easy-to-use and free.

You can see it in the Marketplace here - you need the Zune client for the link.

If you've any feedback or criticism send me an e-mail or post in this thread and I'll get back to you.

Enjoy.

AntiVirus

Odaise Gaelach wrote: »

For all you Windows Phone 7 owners,

I've developed an app for WP7 called Irish Train Times. It shows real-time arrivals and departures information for over a hundred train stations in Ireland. It auto-refreshes every five minutes and uses Iarnród Éireann's own feeds. It's quick, easy-to-use and free.

You can see it in the Marketplace here - you need the Zune client for the link.

If you've any feedback or criticism send me an e-mail or post in this thread and I'll get back to you.

Enjoy.

I just had a quick look there and its seems nice and clean. One thing you could add is a favourites list.

Oh and add in a settings page where you can select it to open on on your Favourites list if you want.

Odaise Gaelach

AntiVirus wrote: »

I just had a quick look there and its seems nice and clean. One thing you could add is a favourites list.

Oh and add in a settings page where you can select it to open on on your Favourites list if you want.

Aha, I see. I'll think about that... Cheers!

evolutionqy7

will try it out and let you know ;P

Dean_Mc

Hi, are you doing this open source? I'm working on a few wp7 apps also, the more the merrier I say. If you ever need a hand I can give you my email addy.

Odaise Gaelach

Your offer is appreciated, but no thanks.

I should probably say that I'm still working on this - I submitted an update for certification last week, which would have included the ability to add stations as favourites and select a different refresh time from the usual 5 minute intervals.

But it failed certification and I was busy the past few days with a different request. So I'm going to carefully hammer out the kinks (like Father Ted with the car) within the next few days and submit the debugged update. Hopefully it'll be released before Friday!

Dean_Mc

Cool, the offer also stands in terms of help with general stuff like blend and that, if your ever unsure of anything drop me a pm and I will try to help the best I can, best of luck.

Odaise Gaelach

So Irish Train Times update 1.2 has been approved for the Marketplace, and hopefully it'll be out sometime within the next few days. New features are the ability to add up to 20 stations as favourites, and you can now change the refresh time from 1, 2, 5, 10 or 15 minutes. My most humble and sincere thanks to AntiVirus for the suggestions.

(By the way, I tried to implement that "setting that it automatically opens up to your favourites", but it was what caused the three reasons for the app to fail certification. So by default it'll start in your favourites and you can add them to it ).


I had a quick glance at the reviews of the app, and someone gave it one star, with the comments that it was "Missing lots of stations". My fellow board.ies, I don't like to let constructive criticism annoy me or make me obsessed (

but it ****ing has

) so I'm looking into it.


EDIT: I've just looked briefly into it - yes, I am missing a huuugggeeee amount of stations. So I'm going to get them into the app as soon as possible. Probably by the beginning of next week. Sorry about that.

Odaise Gaelach

Okay, just thought I'd give a quick update for anyone who's interested...

(A few days later than planned) Version 1.3 was certified this evening so the app updated should be out sometime tonight or tomorrow morning. The changelog is:

• Adds the missing 38 stations, bringing the total from 108 to 146. As far as I'm aware, this is higher than any other similar app out on the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace.
• As a bonus feature, pressing on a route will show the stops for that route, the arrival and departure times as well as what stations the train has visited, what stations are left and the next station.
• An option to disable automatic refreshing. From the Settings page, choose Manual refresh to stop automatic refreshing. Of course you can still refresh the realtime data if you press the refresh button.

Once again, all realtime information is taken straight from the Iarnród Éireann website and might not always be completely accurate!


The update should go smoothly for everyone. If you're having problems, even if you've resolved them, I want to hear from you. For my own education more than anything else. Maybe I can avoid these problems in my next app or project.


Finally, I was thinking about adding in one final feature: Sharing.

Suppose you have a friend who needs to know when a train is leaving their station. You could look up the station on your Windows Phone, choose the route, and then press a button to text or e-mail the information to the contact. It wouldn't be as easy as that (when is it?) and it wouldn't be a substitute for a proper Journey Planner but the idea's the same. Would this be something that's worth putting into the app? Would people get the use out of it?

Odaise Gaelach

I know it's been nearly six months since the last post in this thread, but I would like to ask anyone who's been using v1.5 if they've found any bugs or problems with the app, particularly with the Journey Planner.

I'm asking specifically because I'm planning an update to take advantage of the new features in Mango. But if I submit an app update for Mango then I can no longer submit separate updates for NoDo.

Because the Mango rollout might take some time the app would ideally be very stable for phones running NoDo. So I'd like to know just how buggy the app is. If it's very buggy then I'll release a new update for NoDo that'll make it more stable. If not then I'll keep working on an update for Mango.

Odaise Gaelach

Since this is the only place that I share news about the app on (I intend on making a Facebook page maybe soon) there's an important announcement that I have to make about the app to whom it concerns.

Iarnród Éireann changed their website today (I think?) to a new, nicer site. Unfortunately, despite my asking them, they did not notify me in advance that the new site would be replacing the old one today. Which means that the Irish Train Times app is completely useless now and will be for the next week or so until I can get a new update rolled out.

It also means that any saved journeys which use the old site's URLs will need to be updated if that's possible. If it's not, or it takes too long, then they'll probably end up being deleted when the app is updated.

It's a very bad situation for everyone that uses the app; I'm dismayed and sick and furious at it too. But I'm going to hammer out the update as quickly as possible, and fix a few bugs too if I can.

Really sorry about this everyone.

johnny_rambo

Does the app link directly to the Iarnród Éireann feed or your own API wrapper?

Odaise Gaelach

The app takes all of its data from the Iarnród Éireann website. There's not much of an API to speak of, apart from what is in the app that it uses to query, collect, parse and display the data. The new site has also added and removed some data points that have to be accomodated.

johnny_rambo

If you write your own API wrapper, you'll only have to update the wrapper code whenever Iarnród Éireann changes their website. That way users won't have to update the app....it'll be back working again when you update the wrapper. Just a thought.

Atomic Pineapple

Use PHP to scrape what your scraping and compile it into xml and send this to your app, then when IE change there site (and they will) then you just have to change the PHP script and not update the app.

Odaise Gaelach

The problem with that approach is that it's not going to make parsing the Iarnród Éireann website any easier, which is taking up the majority of my time now. It'd also mean writing code for a web server as well, which I've got almost no experience in at all. I know a bit of ASP.NET but absolutely no PhP.

At this stage the app will have to be updated regardless, because Iarnród Éireann have added data fields and removed some from both the real-time feeds and the journey planner. So the app will have to be updated to handle those new cases. Plus I'm now convinced that I can't salvage the saved journeys on people's phones, so the app needs to be updated anyway to delete the old saved data and handle the new fields.

The API wrapper idea is a nice one, but definitely at this stage it's far too impractical and would save very little time, if any at all.

johnny_rambo

The wrapper is not intended to save you time; it's designed to make your app more robust. With your existing architecture, when IE change their website only people who update their app will be able to use it. If you put another layer between your app and the IE website, then everyones app will be working once you update the wrapper.

Odaise Gaelach

I don't think that the version differences is really an issue. The only phones that won't get the update are ones without Mango, and the overwhelming majority of phones have Mango as it is. People seem to be pretty good about updating their apps. They'll get a notification that there's an update in the Marketplace or on the tile if it's pinned to their Start screen. I've gotten seven error report e-mails from people over the past few days, and all of them were from the current app version (v1.6). I've never gotten an error e-mail from an app that wasn't the most up-to-date for that time*. An added side-effect is that people will know that the problem has been fixed when they get the notification and update the app, whereas if a wrapper API on a website has been changed then they won't get any notification and only they know when they'll check the app again to see if it's working. I've gotten a reply from someone who asked about the problems, and he said, "I look forward to seeing the update."

The webpage scraper is always going to be a weak point whether it's in the app or on a web server: if it fails then the whole thing fails. One benefit of having a web server is that I could fix individual components and then add the new code to the web server, so that parts of the app will work before others. I've had the real-time feeds working since Tuesday. But that leaves a kind of disjoint in the app, in having some things working and others not, and I think that one app update that'll fix everything is preferable.

As well as that, in this case Iarnród Éireann changed some of the data fields that they were returning, not just how. So the UI code on the app needs to be updated, as well as the code needed to save a journey to a phone. And like I said before, saved journeys already on the phone are almost certainly going to have to be deleted for the next version. So the app is going to need to be updated anyway.

The API wrapper idea has its merits, but it's not how the app is designed and it's not how things are now, which I'm working with. To be honest if I did the app again from scratch I still wouldn't implement an API wrapper. And that's all I'm going to say about it in this thread.


Little bit of news for everyone else: the real-time feeds appear to be working, and the journey planner is almost complete. I'll give it another day of testing and it should be good enough to submit for certification. Once again though any saved journeys you have on the phone will be deleted with the update.


*Actually, the error reporting function in the app is not terribly good. I should fix it sometime.

ozymandius

Thanks for the great app. Looking forward to the update.

Just a heads-up. Don't know if you are site-scraping or not. Have you seen this?

http://api.irishrail.ie/realtime/realtime.asmx

Odaise Gaelach

Cheers for the heads-up ozymandius, but I already know about the API and to be frank I haven't implemented it in the app.

The reason for this is because I was very kindly told about it on Tuesday last week from Stephen McBride who made Next Train Ireland for Android. But at that stage I already had a webpage scraper for the real-time feeds working, so I decided to push ahead with getting the rest of the app working and into the Marketplace instead of spending another while implementing the much-more-elegant API.

The app should be using their APIs, and I will get around to implementing it. Eventually. But on the upside I submitted the app for certification yesterday, so provided that I haven't made any monumental ****ups - which I have done in the past - and it passes certification it should be on your phones soon.